“My DVD drive is not operating properly. It can play music CDs but when it plays DVDs the video and the sound are distorted.” It was my customer’s complaint about his Toshiba Satellite L25-S1215 laptop.
The following laptop troubleshooting steps helped me to fix the problem. The laptop booted to Windows pretty fast without any errors, with a normal hard drive sound and spinning CPU fan. I restarted the laptop couple times and didn’t notice anything abnormal. I tested the optical drive with a generic data CD and a DVD movie. The drive recognized the data CD and all files on it but refused to play the DVD correctly. The video and sound output from the DVD movie was choppy, skipping scenes. It looked like a defective DVD drive and I ordered a replacement from Toshiba under warranty. I was pretty sure that a new DVD drive will fix the problem, but it didn’t. After I replaced the DVD drive the same problem occurred right away. The laptop had 256MB memory installed and 64MB were reserved for the video memory. I blamed a lack of memory and installed an extra 512MB memory stick and it didn’t help either. My guess about a corrupted video driver was wrong too because after I downloaded and reinstalled the driver the DVD video still was distorted. In cased like this, when we are not sure what is causing the problem the software or the hardware, we always install a test hard drive and reload the original factory software. I installed a test HDD and reloaded Toshiba Satellite L25 restore CD. After that the problem with a distorted video and audio output was fixed and I was able to play the movie for 2 hours without errors. Most likely, the problem with playing DVD occurred because of corrupted software.
If you have a similar problem with your laptop, do not rush to replace the DVD drive. Backup the important data and run a restore CD, it might fix your problem.
Related posts:
Toshiba Satellite M45 laptop freezes up after playing a DVD movie for about 30 minutes to an hour
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March 8th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Thank you!!!!
I removed the second IDE channel. It was stuck in PIO mode. After uninstalling it, i scanned it for changes, it reinstalled and voila! DVD movies work perfectly again! I’ve had this problem for months with no luck until today. Thanks again.
December 17th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Removing the second IDE channel worked for me, too! But you don’t even need to restart…after it removes the channel, click on the parent IDE controllers (what the second IDE channel was nested under) and choose Scan for Hardware Changes. No need to wait for the reboot…it’ll work after that!
Thanks SO much for this fix!
September 13th, 2007 at 11:13 am
I had the same problem with play back and audio, uninstall the secondary IDE controller from within Device Manager and reboot the machine as per post 15 and it worked, holy pickles I was about to chuck this 2 bit laptop from the 11th floor…. Thank you!
June 16th, 2007 at 2:22 am
Just to confirm James s absolutely correct – I just performed the secondary IDE controller fix and it works.
Previously I had been in touch with Tosh Support (UK) who first suggested uninstall and reboot of the DVD drive, then (wait for it…) finally offered either a system restart (whcih they menetioned hd teh side effect of losing all 50GB of my personal data – or sending the machine in for them to have a look at – which would translate as being without a computer for three weeks and a big bill.
Thank you very much
p.s. Am I alone in liking this machine, but being very disappointed by common faults – I’m on the web it seems like once a month sorting out hardware issues… Can’t really recommend them…
April 10th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
James Zois,
Thank you. I didn’t know that. Next time when I have a similar issue I’ll try that.
April 9th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
The problem is actually much simpler to fix. I’m sorry you wasted many $$ trying to fix this problem.
The video and audio become choppy because the read/write mode on the ide controller for the drive (device 1) had somehow been changed to PIO mode (Program Input Output), instead of DMA. This puts all of the load of streaming data from the drive on the processor. and at 4.5 gigs for a movie that is a huge load.
The fix is to simply uninstall the secondary IDE controller from within Device Manager and reboot the machine. This forces windows to reinstall the drivers for the drive, and the default mode is set to Ultra DMA 2. Of course reistalling windows dd fix the problem, but at the cost of much time and patience.
Thank You!
January 18th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Melinda Wyles,
If you purchased this laptop less then 1 year ago, it still should be covered by Toshiba warranty. Call Toshiba and find out your warranty status or you can check it here.
January 18th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
I have a problem with my Toshiba Laptop!
I started it up like normal, and it didn’t boot all the way up. There was a line through the screen and the letters were jumbled. Is there anyway to fix it? Will Toshiba replace it if not? It is only about a year old.
September 4th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
A question in regards to toshi l25. Mostly directed to pete. I uninstalled the secondary IDE controller from within Device Manager and rebooted. It said “new device found cd dvd etc”, but never installed. Am i to find the restore disc and put that in the drive…A little confused I cant find the original restore disc, and now it shows no cd/dvd drive in My Computer. No sound plays at all either. A little help please
August 31st, 2006 at 12:19 am
Lyn,
Try booting the laptop from any bootable CD or DVD. If the laptop boots fine, then it might be a software issue and it will not be covered under warranty. In this case you can backup all important information from the hard drive and after that re-image the hard drive. Start the laptop from the recovery CD/DVD and follow the wizard. BACKUP the hard drive before you re-image the drive!!!
If the laptop will not boot form a bootable CD, then you might have a bad optical drive. The replacement should be covered under Toshiba warranty.
Sometimes it happens because of a loose connection between the drive and the motherboard and reseating the drive can fix the problem.
Check out my previous post about disappeared CD-ROM drive.